The Doll (68 page)

And he examined a plan of the city, mocking his own efforts. ‘Only one man, and a genius at that, can create a style, a plan,' he thought. ‘But that a million people, working across several centuries and ignorant of each other, should create some kind of a logical whole, it is simply impossible.'

Slowly, however, to his great surprise, he perceived that this Paris, built over several centuries, by a million people, ignorant of each other and with no plan in mind, did, nevertheless, have a plan, it constituted a whole, even a very logical one.

He was first struck by the fact that Paris was like a great bowl, nine kilometres wide from north to south and eleven kilometres long from east to west. To the south, this bowl was cracked and divided by the Seine, which cut it in a bow running from the north-east corner through the centre of the city and turning to the south-west corner. An eight-year-old child could have outlined such a plan.

‘All right,' thought Wokulski, ‘but where is the order in the positioning of individual buildings…Notre-Dame in one direction, the Trocadéro in another, and the Louvre, the Exchange, the Sorbonne!…Nothing but chaos…'

But when he began to examine the plan of Paris more closely, he noticed something that not only native Parisians had failed to perceive (which was less strange), but even K. Baedeker, who claimed the right to know his way about the whole of Europe.

Despite an apparent chaos, Paris did have a plan, a logic, even though it had been built over several centuries by millions of people ignorant of each other and giving no thought at all to logic or style.

Paris possessed what could be called a backbone, the city's crystal axis.

The Vincennes forest lay in the south-east, and the edge of the Bois de Boulogne on the north-west side of Paris. So—this crystal axis of the city was like a great caterpillar (almost six kilometres in length) which, bored with the Bois de Vincennes, had gone for a walk to the Bois de Boulogne.

Its tail leaned against the Place de la Bastille, its head on the Etoile, its body cleaved almost to the Seine. The Champs-Elysées were the neck, the Tuileries and Louvre its corset, and its tail was the Hôtel de Ville, Notre-Dame and, finally, the July Column on the Place de la Bastille.

This caterpillar possessed many long and short legs. From the head, the first pair leaned to the left: the Champ de Mars, the Trocadéro Palace and Exhibition; to the right they reached as far as the Montmartre cemetery. The second pair (of shorter legs) reached the Military School on the left, the Hotel des Invalides, and the Chamber of Deputies; to the right the Madeleine church and the Opéra. Then (ever on towards the tail), to the left the School of Fine Arts, to the right the Palais Royal, the bank and Stock Exchange; to the left the Institut de France and mint, to the right Les Halles; to the left the Palais du Luxembourg, the Cluny museum and Medical School, to the right the Place de la République, with the Prince Eugène barracks.

Aside from the crystal axis and the regularities in the general contours of the city, Wokulski also became convinced (something the guides pointed out anyway) that in Paris there existed whole divisions of human labour and some order in their arrangement. Between the Place de la Bastille and the Place de la République were grouped mainly trade and craftsmen; opposite them, on the other bank of the Seine, was the ‘Latin Quarter', a nest of students and scholars. Between the Opéra, the Place de la République and the Seine was export trade and finance; between Notre-Dame, the Institut de France and the Montparnasse cemetery clustered the remains of the country's aristocracy. From the Opéra to the Etoile stretched the neighbourhood of the wealthy parvenus, and opposite them, on the left bank of the Seine, opposite the Hotel des Invalides and the Military School, was the seat of military affairs and World Exhibitions.

These observations woke new currents in Wokulski's soul, of which he had not thought before, or only imprecisely. And so the great city, like a plant or beast, had its own anatomy and physiology. And so the work of millions of people who proclaimed their free will so loudly produced the same results as bees building regular honeycombs, ants raising rounded mounds, or chemical compounds forming regular crystals.

Thus there was nothing accidental in society, but an inflexible law which, as if in irony at human pride, manifested itself so clearly in the life of the most capricious of nations, the French! It had been ruled by Merovingians and Carolingians, Bourbons and Bonapartes; there had been three republics and a couple of anarchies, the Inquisition and atheism; rulers and ministers followed one upon the other like the cut of gowns or the clouds in the sky…But despite so many apparently fundamental changes, Paris took on ever more precisely the form of a dish torn by the Seine; the crystal axis was delineated ever more clearly running from the Place de la Bastille to the Etoile; ever more clearly did the districts define themselves: the learned and the industrial, the ancestral and the industrial, the military and the parvenu.

Wokulski perceived this same fatalism in the history of a dozen of the more prominent Parisian families. The grandfather, as a humble craftsman, worked at the rue du Temple, sixteen hours a day; his son, plunging into the Latin quarter, set up a larger workshop in the rue St-Antoine. His grandson, even more submerged in the scholarly district, moved as a great tradesman to the Boulevard Poissonnier, and his grandson, as a millionaire, set up house in the neighbourhood of the Champs-Elysées so that…his daughters could suffer from nervous dispositions at the Boulevard St-Germain. Thus a race exhausted with work and enriched near the Bastille, worn out alongside the Tuileries, expired in the vicinity of Notre-Dame. The city's topography reflected this history of its inhabitants.

Pondering this strange regularity of facts, recognised as irregular, Wokulski sensed that if anything was to cure his apathy, it would be analysis of this kind.

‘I am a strange man,' he said to himself, ‘and so have gone mad, but civilisation will rescue me.'

Every day in Paris brought him new ideas or clarified the secrets of his own soul. Once, drinking iced coffee in a café, a street singer drew near the verandah and, to the accompaniment of a harp, sang:

And at once several customers echoed the last passage: ‘Fools!' Wokulski thought, ‘they've nothing better to do than repeat such rubbish.' He rose, scowling, and with a pain in his heart, walked through a crowd of people as lively, noisy, chattering and singing as children let out of school: ‘Fools! Fools!' he repeated.

But suddenly he wondered whether it was not he, rather, who was the fool? ‘If all these people were like me,' he told himself, ‘Paris would be a hospital for the melancholy mad. Everyone would be haunted by memories, the streets would turn into puddles, the houses into ruins. Yet they take life as it is, they pursue practical aims, are happy and create masterpieces. And what am I pursuing? First it was perpetual motion and guided balloons, then a position to which my own allies refused to admit me, then a woman I'm hardly allowed to approach. But I have always either sacrificed myself or submitted to ideas created by those classes which want to make me their servant, their slave…'

And he imagined how it would have been if he'd been born in Paris instead of Warsaw. In the first place, he would have been enabled to learn more as a child because of the many schools and colleges. Then, even if he had gone into trade, he would have experienced less unpleasantness and more help in his studies. Further, he wouldn't have worked on a perpetual motion machine, for he'd have known that many similar machines which never worked were to be found in the museums here. Had he tried to construct guided balloons, he would have found models, a whole crowd of dreamers like himself, and even help if his ideas were practical.

And, had he finally made a fortune for himself and fallen in love with an aristocratic young lady, he would not have encountered so many obstacles in approaching her. He might have made her acquaintance and either recovered or won her hand. Under no circumstances would he have been treated like a Negro in America. Besides, was it possible in Paris to fall in love as he had done—to the point of insanity? Here lovers did not despair, but danced, sang and lived a gay life. If they could not have an official marriage, they created a free union: if they could not keep their children, they put them out to nurse. Here love would surely never lead a sensible man into madness.

‘The last two years of my existence,' thought Wokulski, ‘have been passed in the pursuit of a woman I might even have rejected if I'd known her better. All my energies, studies, talents and huge fortune are absorbed into a single emotion because I am in trade and she an aristocrat. Perhaps society, by harming me harms itself?'

Here Wokulski reached the apex of his self-criticism: he saw how preposterous his situation was, and resolved to extricate himself: ‘What am I to do, though? What am I to do?' he thought. ‘Why, the same as everyone else, to be sure!' And what did they do?…Above all they worked extraordinarily hard, up to sixteen hours a day, regardless of Sundays and holidays, thanks to a selection process here in which only the strongest had the right to survive. A sickly man would perish before the year was out, an incompetent one within a matter of years, and only the strongest and cleverest were left.

These, thanks to the work of whole generations of strivers like themselves, found here the satisfaction of all their needs. Huge sewers protected them from disease, wide streets facilitated the flow of air; the Halles Centrales provided food, a thousand factories—clothing and furniture. When a Parisian wanted to see nature, he travelled beyond the city or to the Bois; if he wanted art to gladden his eyes, he went to the Louvre; and when he desired knowledge, he had museums and scientific collections.

To strive for happiness in all domains—this was the substance of Parisian life. Here, a thousand carriages were introduced to counter tiredness; to counter boredom, hundreds of theatres and shows; to counter ignorance, hundreds of museums, libraries, and lectures. Here, not only man met with concern, but even the horse, for whom a smooth road was provided. Here, care was lavished even on the trees, which were transported in special carts to their new places of abode, protected with iron baskets from all who might harm them, ensured moist conditions, nurtured in the event of disease.

Thanks to a solicitude towards all things, objects finding themselves in Paris possessed a variety of advantages. Houses, furniture and utensils were not only useful, but beautiful; they pleased not only the sinews, but also the mind. And vice versa—works of art were not only beautiful, but useful. At the side of triumphant arches and church steeples were steps, facilitating one's ascent to look at the town from a height. Statues and paintings were accessible not only to their devotees, but to artists and sculptors who were permitted to make copies in the galleries.

A Frenchman, when he created something, first took care that the work should meet its aim, and only then that it should be beautiful. And, not content with that, he strove also for permanence and purity. Wokulski ascertained this truth at every step and with every object, beginning with the carts carrying away rubbish, to the Venus de Milo surrounded by a barrier. He guessed also the consequences of such economy, that work was not wasted here: each generation gave its successors the finest works of its forefathers, supplementing them with its own output.

In this way, Paris was an ark in which were housed the trophies of a dozen centuries, if not whole millenniums, of civilisation. There was everything here, from monstrous Assyrian statues and Egyptian mummies, to the latest discoveries of mechanics and electrotechnology, from jars in which Egyptian women had carried their water 4000 years ago, to the great hydraulic wheels of St-Maur.

‘The men who created these marvels,' thought Wokulski, ‘or who collected them together in one place, they were not crazed idlers like myself…'

And thus saying to himself, he felt overcome by shame.

And, after dealing with Suzin's business for a few hours, he would wander around Paris. He strolled down unknown streets, immersed himself in a crowd of thousands, plunged into the apparent chaos of things and events, and at the bottom of it all he found order and law. Then again he would drink brandy for a change, play cards or roulette, or give way to dissipation. It seemed to him that he was going to encounter something extraordinary in this volcanic centre of civilisation, and that a new epoch in his life would start here. At the same time he felt that his hitherto scattered fragments of knowledge and his opinions would merge into a sort of unity or philosophical system, which might explain to him many of the world's mysteries and the meaning of his own existence.

‘What am I?' he asked himself sometimes, and gradually he formulated his own reply: ‘I am a man who has gone to waste. I had great talents and energy, but have done nothing for civilisation. The eminent people I meet here don't have even half my powers, yet they leave behind them machines, buildings, works of art, new ideas. But what shall I leave behind? My store, perhaps—but that would have gone to wrack and ruin if Rzecki were not looking after it…Yet I haven't been idle: I struggled for three men, and had I not been helped by chance I wouldn't even have the fortune I now possess.'

Then it occurred to him to ask what he had squandered his powers and his life on? ‘On struggling with an environment into which I didn't fit. When I wanted to study, I could not, because in my country scholars aren't needed—only peasants and store clerks. When I wanted to serve society by sacrificing my own life if need be, fantastic dreams were put forward instead of a practical programme and then—were forgotten. When I sought work, I was not given any, but shown an easy way to marry an old woman for her money. When I finally fell in love, and wanted to become the legal father of a family, the pastor of a domestic circle, the holiness of which everyone acclaimed, then I was placed in a situation from which there was no way out. So much so, that I don't know whether the woman I was crazy about was an ordinary flirt whose head had been turned, or perhaps a lost soul like myself, who had not found her proper way. Judging by her behaviour, she is an eligible young lady looking for the best possible husband: when one looks into her eyes, she is an angelic spirit, whose wings have been clipped by human conventions. If I'd had some tens of thousands of roubles a year, and a passion for whist, I'd have been the happiest man in Warsaw,' he said to himself, ‘but because in addition to a stomach I have a soul which is greedy for knowledge and love, I would have had to perish there. That is a region where certain kinds of plants cannot grow, nor certain kinds of people either…'